High school freshmen and sophomores at St. Joseph-Ogden High
School in St. Joseph, Illinois
were presented with the following school
assignment:
The following ten people have a
problem. They are all in desperate need of Kidney Dialysis (the process that
removes wastes from the bloodstream). Unless they receive this procedure, they
will die. The local hospital has enough machines to support only six people.
That means four people are not going to live. You must decide from the
information below which six will survive. Next to each person’s short biography
there is a line where you place a score. Put the people in order using 1-10, 1
being the person you want to save first and 10 being the person you would save
last. You are only to use the information provided.
The ten
patients were identified as follows:
- A 35-year-old white married female housewife with a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
- A 65-year-old Latino married male doctor with no children.
- A 60-year-old black married male lawyer with a 25-year-old son.
- A 9-year-old white female disabled person.
- A 20-year-old white male college student.
- A 40-year-old black married male ex-convict with a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old son.
- A 23-year-old white unmarried female prostitute with a 3-year-old daughter.
- A 35-year-old black married male teacher with no children.
- A 55-year-old white married female Lutheran minister with a 27-year-old son and a 30-year-old daughter.
- A 47-year-old black unmarried male police officer with no children.
When asked by reporter Lennie Jarratt, Brian Brooks, the
school’s principal stated the alleged
reason for the lesson:
The assignment you are referring to is not a
“Death Panel” assignment. The assignment is one in the sociology unit of
our Introduction To Social Studies class. The purpose of the assignment
is to educate students about social values and how people in our society
unfortunately create biases based off of professions, race, gender, etc.
The teacher’s goal is to educate students in the fact that these social value
biases exist, and that hopefully students will see things from a different
perspective after the activity is completed. The teacher’s purpose in the
element of the assignment you are referring to is to get students emotionally
involved to participate in the classroom discussion, and to open their minds to
the fact that they themselves have their own social biases. The
assignment has nothing to do with a “Death Panel.”
We encourage parents to contact their
son/daughter’s teachers if they have any concerns about an assignment in the
classroom. That line of communication typically clears up any potential
misunderstanding.
Many will be
unwilling to take Mr. Brooks at his words and will claim that this lesson plan
is a covert method of getting students prepared for and willing to accept death
panels in the future. Given the failure of public schools in actually educating
students properly and the eagerness of public schools to indoctrinate students,
it is possible that Mr. Brooks is being less than honest.
The more interesting question concerns how one should deal
with this thought experiment. There are two correct answers. One of these
involves the immediate answer. The other is a broader and longer term answer.
One may be more than tempted to use the strategy employed by
James Tiberius Kirk when facing the Kobayashi Maru and cheat. However, the
rules of this game dictate that six of the ten patients will live, and four
will die. Progressives, fascists, communists, and other collectivists who apply
utilitarian thinking will rank the patients according to their own warped
prejudices. However, judging the value of human beings is not something that a
hospital or any business should do. Yes, that is right. A hospital is a
business. In order to avoid having to make the kind of moral judgments that
ought not be made at all, and especially ought not be made by bureaucratic bean
counters, the hospital should simply offer its dialysis services first come, first
serve on a contractual basis. While the bleeding heart will object and claim
that this is unjust because it means only those who can afford the service will
get it, this is actually the most just. Those who can afford the service will
pay for it. Perhaps some out of pocket and others through insurance. However,
by earning a profit, the hospital will be able to put some of that money back
into the business and buy additional dialysis machines. Making the pie bigger
through free market profits enables more to benefit.
The longer term answer involves fixing the health care
system and the economy in general. If the health care system is overhauled
according to free market principles, the cost of dialysis and other crucial
medical procedures will drop. However, the economy needs to be based more on
free market principles as a whole. If corporatist monstrosities like the
Federal Reserve’s “inflation tax,” big government corporate and medical
regulations, high taxes, and wasteful government spending were to disappear,
then people would be wealthier as a whole and more able to afford necessary
medical procedures such as dialysis. In reality, death panels can only exist
where there is big government and collectivism.
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